WEEK 6: Dr. Thunder

Well let's see. I've exchanged 2 times this week; the first time was with the Zone leaders, so I was with Elder Wright for a day.  The whole week Elder Goldsberry and I were prepping appointments for me when Elder Wright got here.  We ended up having a completely full schedule, with member team-ups and everything, and then as soon as we traded companions, like immediately, I get a text from one saying they have to cancel.  Great.  Then another one canceled.  Great.  Now all we had was a dinner appointment and a short 45-minute lesson for a total of a 6-hour period.  So we went out walking along the street after dinner and ran into some guy sweeping out a parking space in front of his house.  He started talking to us and he has a lot of the core beliefs that we do and wanted to learn more, so we have an appointment set up with him for tomorrow. Pretty cool how "coincidences" like that seem to always happen.

I made the mistake of eating fettuccine Alfredo without taking a Lactaid pill. I won't get into details but it was pretty bad.

I found someone else in this place that calls an ice pop a Freezy!  Everyone down here calls them Otter Pops. I guess that's the popular brand down in America.  Everyone would look at me weird when I called it a freezy.

 Me and my companion mixed red thunder (a Red Bull knock off) and Dr. Pepper this morning. We wanted to see how it tasted. It tasted pretty good, but we probably won't do that for a while.  I initially called it Red Pepper, but then I realized Dr. Thunder sounds like WAY cooler. (Energy drinks are only for days that we are super tired).

I found another sign, this one is pretty hilarious.  Like I have no idea why it even exists.

Some members ended up happening upon a TON of bread so they gave a ton to the other elders in our area, and gave some to us.  WE ended up getting like 3 packs of bagels, 2 loafs of bread, a bunch of cookies, and a big thing of garlic bread. So we threw the garlic bread in the oven to get it nice and soft and warm and ate a GIANT loaf of it for dinner one night.

Anyways, that's everything for this week. I miss everyone!

-Love Elder C

WEEK 5: YOSHI

WHAT A WEEK!

Let's see, Monday was the last time we got to see one of the senior missionary couples serving in the area; they went home so that was sad.  I got packages from my mom, which was awesome.  I bought Spiderman bedding, I'll attach a picture, it's awesome, coolest bedding in the mission.

On Thursday I went on an exchange with a missionary named Elder Beard; he's a cool dude.  He's super into like the really deep doctrine stuff, and he likes to bible bash with people as often as he can.  He serves in Sevierville which is where dollywood is.  I didn't get a picture but it was pretty cool.  We went to bed a little late (whoops) and then we woke up and played basketball outside for our morning exercise (their house has 2 floors and has a park right around the corner, jealoussssss). He gave me a Yoshi Amiibo that he found one day just laying around somewhere, so that's pretty cool that I'll have that with me for my whole mission.  

When we exchanged back we met on this random road between Sevierville and Maryville.  That's when I saw it: the sign.  My jaw dropped and I immediately demanded that we take a picture.  I think it's some of my best work.  Elder Beard isn't in the picture but his name is on the frisbee that I'm holding.  Elder Hoff is on the right (He's Elder Beard's regular companion) and Elder Goldsberry is wearing my glasses.

Another thing I've gotten myself into is Kendama. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's basically a ball and a string tied to a wood thing and you do tricks with it, kind of like a yoyo, except it's way hard, and looks way cool.

I found it at a bargain store for like $8 and it was regularly like $25 or something.  I'm getting pretty good at it. I didn't start actually playing with it til Friday, but I'm hoping by the end of my mission I'll be able to do some crazy stuff.

I'll keep this one short and just provide you guys some sweet pics.

WEEK 4: Doughnuts

Just a small addiction.

Elder Goldsberry and Elder C checking their email.

I miss Timmy

Wow, here I am in my 4th week, and I feel like just yesterday I left on the airplane from Calgary to the MTC in Utah.  I finally got my own library card this week, so now I can hop on the computers on Monday without going through the hassle of asking one of the workers to sign me in and getting my photo id out, and then going through all the questions of me being a Canadian in Tennessee.  I never noticed how hard it was to find a doughnut here in Tennessee. I guess I was spoiled in Canada where I could hit up a Timmy Ho's like any time I wanted.  On Monday my Companion Elder Goldsberry had the biggest craving for a doughnut I've ever seen. We drove around for 45 minutes on p-day going to different gas stations around town trying to find doughnuts.  Eventually we gave up only to find out 2 days later that there was a doughnut shop less than a mile from our house. WHOOPS.  

I ate a vegan eggplant dish on saturday, and let me tell you: it was hard to not throw up. I've had meat for every meal since I got out here and then I get thrown eggplant in tomato sauce. The first 2 were edible but the last piece I was served had like seeds all in it or something, I don't know.  I'm no eggplant aficionado but I knew that it tasted gross.  

My feet hurt.  I have Metatarsalgia. It's a foot condition where the fat pads that go over the bones in your feet get pushed up into the toes, so you get this sensation of walking straight on bones.  To be honest I'm not doing a ton of walking but the basketball I play kills my feet pretty good. I get to check for packages today so here's hoping that problem gets solved.  

We went knocking on doors on thursday and boy was that a tough time. It was like 90 something degrees out and super humid; we were soaked in about 40 minutes.  

Well now that I'm done complaining let's talk about a cool experience I had:

Our phone has about 400 numbers in it, most of which we have no clue who they are, but some missionaries are super smart and mark the numbers with an "(i)" for investigators.  So I went through the phone seeing all these "(i)"s and I felt prompted to call a specific number.  The name just said "Fred" so I called it.  "Hey Fred this is the missionaries, we just wanted to give you a call and maybe set up an appointment so we could come see you some time later this week."  His reply was something like: "Well I'm at work right now. Can you call me back a little later in the week?"  I said sure and hung up.  On Friday we went to the library to do what we call mormon.org hour, so we can look at a few online resources for an hour a week.  We go in and a man approaches us.  IT'S FRED. It was pretty crazy. If I hadn't made that call he probably wouldn't have approached us. It's just funny how stuff like that works out. We haven't made an appointment with him yet but we're hoping to meet with him sometime this week.

Well I don't like these being too long so I'm going to cut off here. I love / miss everyone!

-Elder C 

P.S  I just added a picture of Dr. Pepper.  VANILLA DR. PEPPER... ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  It's not that bad. It kind of tastes like vanilla ice cream with the standard dr pepper aftertaste. I don't think I like it as much as regular Dr Pepper but it's still pretty good.  I would recommend you try it if you're ever in America / Live in America.

P.S.S Baja Blast Mountain Dew is amazing.

WEEK 3: Spanish?

Well dang, lots of stuff happened this week, like a ton.  We left early Tuesday morning from the MTC and I mean EARLY! It was 3:30 AM when we had to report to the travel office so we were up by 2:50 and ended up being late.  I was the travel leader of a group of 8, so I had to lead them to the travel office, then to the bus, then to to the train, then to the other train, then to the airport, and all the way through security until we made it to the gate.  At this point it was 7:40 and nobody had eaten anything.  The first thing everyone did was look for phone cards, which I was opposed to. I told everyone to find other Mormons and use their phones for free (I mean seriously in the Salt Lake City Utah airport there's gotta be a billion of them.) They ended up wasting like 10 minutes trying to find a store with phone cards but everywhere was sold out.  I'm starving hard at this point. I ran to a store and bought a bottle of cherry coke because that stuff is amazing, then ran everyone over to the food court.  Some people got McDonalds, but I waited in line extra long to get Cafe Rio, so worth it.  There's no Cafe Rio in Tennessee so I knew it would be my last opportunity to get some. We flew to the Atlanta airport then had to take a train to  the correct terminal.  We then flew to Knoxville (They pronounce it KNOX-VULL). When we arrived we found a couple of members of the church who were actually flying out so they took our picture and sent it to everyone's parents.  

We then ran to baggage and met the Mission President and His assistants and his wife.  Wow this is taking forever to write I'm gonna speed this up.  WE got back to presidents house and got our ipads set up (SWEET) then went to bed at like 9 pm (Which was really 7pm because of time difference change).

The next morning we got to meet a ton of missionaries.  We had our transfer meeting and I met my companion!  I was assigned to serve in Maryville, Tennessee. It's like 30-40 minutes or something like that outside of Knoxville.  My companion's name is Elder Goldsberry. He's a pretty cool dude. He's super chill like me, he's good at lacrosse, and he has a sense of humor.  We get along great.  

After getting back to the apartment on transfer day (Wednesday) we went and helped a not-active family load up a u-haul so they could move the next day.

Thursday came and a train derailed in Maryville and released toxic gases into the air. (Sweet second day eh?) We were stuck in the apartment all day, so I took it upon myself to clean the nastiest bathroom I've ever seen. Elder Goldsberry cleaned the shower and I cleaned the Sink and toilet, then we did our weekly planning and went out to some appointments, but all the appointments canceled so that was lame.  

Saturday was the 4th of july, it was pretty unexciting.

Sunday I learned how to stay awake in church.  There's these candies called "Fireballs" they're like a cinnamon heart, but it's a jawbreaker and they last forever.  They wake you right the heck up.

We went to a random Pentecostal church after we went to ours; it was crazy.  The first 45 minutes of church was like a concert. It was pretty cool (like legit rockband singing songs about jesus for 45 minutes).  The way they preach is a lot different but  all the members feel the spirit and they were super welcoming to us.

And now today is P-Day the day we get to write emails for an hour.

Story time:  We went out knocking on doors and we knocked the first door and realized we forgot pass-along cards, so we drove all the way back to the house to grab some.  After wasting 15 minutes doing all that we got some.  We knock on another door, lady answers and we say our thing ("Yo what up, we missionaries from the LDS church, wanna hear about Jesus?") She said no but we gave her a pass-along card.  Elder Goldsberry proceeds to show her the link on the back of it that you can watch a video on. Once the card flips his jaw drops and fear strikes his eyes.  He holds it together and just points to the link. Turns out, every single pass-along card we grabbed from the apartment was in Spanish.  

A few important things:

Address: Tennessee Knoxville mission

11320 station west dr. ste 101

Farragut, TN 37934

iPads, any time I get wifi I get all the emails that have arrived so far and I can read them; I'm just not allowed to send out emails til monday.  I can however write drafts of emails that I have recieved, so even though my P-Day is Monday you don't need to wait til Sunday to send me emails; sending them earlier gives me more of a chance to write drafts and it saves me a ton of time.  

MUSIC: PLEASE SEND ME MUSIC! Like seriously, I found out our music restrictions are basically "Listen to anything that doesn't take away from the spirit"  So that really only restricts like Death metal, pop songs, and lots of rock.  I can still listen to anything instrumental, or any songs that have good messages behind them.

Wow that was along entry, I'll try to keep them shorter from now on.

-Elder Christensen